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“What with ad-optimizing technologies and filter-defying product placement, search-based ad serves, real-time media bidding, and location-based features for mobile devices,” the author writes, “it would be easy to conclude that advertising has flipped to all science and no art.” But she highlights six campaigns to prove that advertising creativity will never cease:

Wonderful Pistachios, whose ads include memes such as YouTube’s infamous Honey Badger and Secret Service agents partying with prostitutes

Coca-Cola China, which created a TV-plus-smartphone game for the Hong Kong market

Nabisco’s “Daily Twist” campaign for Oreo cookies, in which members of the public nominated news pegs and company designers sculpted cookies to illustrate them

Marks and Spencer, which introduced “shwopping”—a campaign with Oxfam to encourage clothing recycling

Neiman Marcus and Target, which teamed up on some merchandise, became the sole sponsors of ABC’s drama Revenge, and then hired the cast to perform in five long-form commercials

A decade into an internet-driven advertising revolution, is it all over for creative? Looking at the web, you might think so. Your typical browse is thoroughly polluted by mortgage-refinancing and weight-loss ads, none of which came off the drawing boards of great art directors. Their dancing-lady silhouettes and promised “weird old tips” are the output of algorithms that will throw anything at the wall to see if it sticks.

What with ad-optimizing technologies and filter-defying product placement, search-based ad serves, real-time media bidding, and location-based features for mobile devices—all eagerly embraced by ROI-obsessed marketers—it would be easy to conclude that advertising has flipped to all science and no art. But then along comes fresh creative to show us what really sells.

In the next few pages we take a look at six campaigns that stand out because each has a clever idea at its core, an element that is new and deserves to live on. Together they provide assurance that as long as companies are selling, consumers will need persuading—and the creativity of advertising will never cease.

Variations on a Meme: Wonderful Pistachios

Advertising creatives have always known the power of memes, even if they didn’t always use the term. For decades major marketers, with their command of the airwaves and commitment to repetition, were often the ones to launch memes. Alka-Seltzer’s “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing” and the Wendy’s tagline “Where’s the beef?” were picked up and repurposed from preschools to presidential debates.

The splintering of media channels has made it hard to claim that kind of mindshare by brute force. Add the democratization of publishing and the premium people place on discovering the new, and you have a situation where memes can start anywhere, take off like rockets, and fizzle out a week later. Whereas advertisers once spawned memes, now the better strategy may be to surf them.

So expect to see more creative in the mode of the Wonderful Pistachios campaign, which is simple enough to cycle through executions quickly and cheaply. The campaign started out conventionally, using celebrities, and was highly successful: National TV spots in its first year yielded a 233% increase in sales, and double-digit gains have followed in the years since. But now the ads include memes, such as YouTube’s infamous Honey Badger and Secret Service agents partying with prostitutes.

If someone else got a popular meme rolling, why jump on that bandwagon? Because that’s the appeal of memes: trying to do a creative mind one better. People don’t ignore subsequent versions because they’ve already seen the original one—that’s the reason they pay attention in the first place.

In his paper “An Anatomy of a YouTube Meme,” Limor Shifman of Hebrew University analyzes 30 videos that went viral and finds major commonalities: ordinary people, flawed masculinity, humor, simplicity, repetitiveness, and whimsical content. It’s the perfect recipe, Shifman concludes, for “invoking further creative dialogue.” Much of that dialogue comes in the form of clever redos designed to delight particular constituencies. (Thus the ridiculously catchy dance video “Gangnam Style” was tweaked for robot lovers by a Transformers reenactment and infiltrated political circles as “Romney Style.”) A major advertiser with a big budget should be more reliably able to nail the execution for its constituency—snack eaters, for example, or Lego fans. This is the opportunity revealed by the newest pistachios ads. Expect more advertisers to follow suit.

The Ad as a Game: Coca-Cola China

Plenty of advertising is already embedded in electronic games. The new wrinkle is that gaming can be embedded in ads—perhaps the only hope of engaging some people’s interest long enough to get a message across.

Coca-Cola China’s TV ad for the Hong Kong market invited viewers to use their smartphones to “chok” bottle caps flying across their TV screens. A well-timed waggle of the phone would catch a cap on the phone’s screen, earning points (to be redeemed later for sweepstakes entries). This mobile integration was complicated: For instance, people had to download a special app to play, and the timing of the ads had to be announced in advance so that players would be ready. But it all came together and worked. The app was downloaded 380,000 times in its first month, and exposure to the ad (on TV, YouTube, and Weibo combined) exceeded 9 million views.

Electronic games started out as all whizbang technology and no aesthetic appeal. (Pong, anyone?) Today’s gamers demand not only stunning visuals but also narrative and emotional depth. As advancing technology makes such integration more seamless, many marketers will build on this start. Some of them may be surprised at how rapidly creative talent comes back to the fore.

Collaborating with the Crowd: Oreo Cookies

It’s easy to forget how long companies have been inviting ideas from “the crowd.” If you’re in doubt, read The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, a memoir of 1950s America in which the author’s mother writes advertising jingles for contest after contest. Years before Jeff Howe coined and defined the term “crowdsourcing,” marketers knew its power.

Now that the business world has rediscovered the concept, most people celebrate crowdsourcing as a way to get fresher, better ideas. And they’re right: If a company uses Tongal or a similar platform to solicit and sift through thousands of creative submissions, the odds are good that it will be rewarded with some real gems. But the quality of the winning idea is at best only half the argument for crowdsourcing. When ordinary folks sit down to think about how to advertise a product, the marketer gets more engaged customers as well as more creative options.

If you focus on maximizing engagement, you’ll realize that the ideal time commitment to be asked of the crowd measures in minutes. If you expect people to spend hours on beautifully rendered creative, you’ve set the bar too high, because 99% of the public lacks the time and confidence to engage at all.

Nabisco’s “Daily Twist” campaign for Oreo cookies is an example of getting it right. In honor of its centennial, the brand launched a 100-day series of cookie designs pegged to each day’s news. It invited people to nominate news pegs every morning and to vote later in the day for their favorite designs. In the meantime, highly talented designers cooked up the creamy execution. With the bar so low for crowd participation, anyone could offer up thoughts. Sharing of Oreo’s Facebook page rose by 4,400% compared with the three months before the campaign’s launch. Plenty of those people also went out and bought Oreos.

Just Enough Humor: Kia Motors America

In March 2009, Kia Motors America aired a fun little ad for its Soul model car. To evoke the drab mindlessness of the typical daily commute, it showed roads filled with hamster wheels. When a Soul drove up alongside one and its window slid down, the hamsters in the car, chilling to their hip tunes, showed everyone “a new way to roll.”

Kia has stuck with the hamsters since, and in every outing they’re funny but not uproariously so. New research suggests that might be key to their product-selling success. (The campaign is credited with spurring multiple years of double-digit growth in Kia’s U.S. sales.) According to the marketing scholars Thales Teixeira, Rosalind Picard, and Rana el Kaliouby, who used web-based facial tracking to gauge consumer responses to various humorous ads, “excessive amounts of entertainment” tend to backfire and actually reduce an ad’s persuasiveness.

Further Reading

Timing counts, too. “Entertainment evoked before the consumer is aware of the brand being advertised…reduces purchase intent,” the authors report. “But entertainment evoked after the consumer sees the brand…increases purchase intent. In this case, entertainment has a cooperating effect with persuasion.”

Humor has always been part of the advertiser’s tool kit, but its use has always been controversial. “You can entertain a million people and not sell one of them,” observed the ad guru John Caples. Advising copywriters to avoid it, he pointed out, “There is not a single humorous line in two of the most influential books in the world, namely, the Bible and the Sears, Roebuck catalog.” Still, it’s hard to imagine following that advice in an era when consumers are inundated with communications and gravitate instantly to those they find most fun. As research techniques become ever more sophisticated, we’re bound to see humor used more than ever—but also with more precision.

A New Social Movement: Marks and Spencer

Ask anyone in consumer goods why his industry is not more committed to sustainability and you’ll hear the same thing: because the marketplace doesn’t reward us for being so. Sadly, most “socially responsible” goods cost more to produce than alternatives that leave the world worse off, and those costs translate into higher prices. Regarding the merits of passing up the greater bargain for the greater good, most shoppers remain unpersuaded.

But persuading people is what advertising is designed to do. So as marketers become more authentically committed to corporate responsibility goals, expect to see more of them using their messaging powers to change consumer attitudes and behavior.

That is what the British retailing giant Marks and Spencer is doing in its “shwopping” (a conflation of “shopping” and “swapping”) campaign, which suggests that before you rush out to buy the latest fashion, you choose something from your closet to recycle. M&S will make that easy for you through a partnership with Oxfam and convenient “shwop drops” in its stores. But you might decide that you can keep wearing that old thing and you don’t need a new one.

Here’s a for-profit company that is not only promoting something other than the goods it has for sale, but even to some extent suppressing demand for them. It seems like madness until you realize that M&S is playing a longer game. As the UK’s biggest clothing retailer, it can’t afford to be irresponsible—its practices are under heavy scrutiny. If and when its customers start to value sustainability, it stands to win big. CEO Marc Bolland is determined to get there: “We’re leading a change in the way we all shop for clothing, forever.” He hopes the movement will catch on to the point where all stores take back one garment for every one they sell. “For us that’s 350 million a year,” he says. “It is a big number, but with our customers’ help, we will do it.”

Ads That “Go Native”: Neiman Marcus and Target

Content providers maintain an uneasy alliance with advertisers. Both sides know that ads enjoy greater attention when they are hard to separate from the content that surrounds them. And both sides need the advertising to succeed. But the content people also know their customers will balk if they feel that content has been compromised by paid marketing.

As consumers’ devices and desire to filter out ads continue to advance, the degree of permissible intrusion into content keeps changing. First there were advertorials and ad copy rendered in a publication’s house font (albeit discreetly labeled “Paid Advertising”). Then there was material published by “content marketers” on magazine blog networks. All along we’ve had product placement in films, TV shows, and games.

A recent campaign shows how far a marketer can now go to make its advertising blend in with the surrounding context. After the retailers Target and Neiman Marcus teamed up on some merchandise, they decided to advertise it on ABC’s drama series Revenge. First they opted for a “takeover” of the program, meaning that every ad in the hour-long segment was theirs. Then, to make the most of that sole sponsorship, they hired the show’s cast to perform in character in five long-form commercials. These were unquestionably ads (the Target–Neiman Marcus line was prominent in them), but by borrowing all the elements viewers had chosen to enjoy and stringing the spots into a “story within a story,” the marketers made them hard to skip.

What instantly became clear is that there is a big difference between ads that travel into native territory and ads that “go native.” Extra expense and tricky constraints are involved when a brand chooses to assimilate with indigenous content. But those that can move comfortably in this realm may never go home again.

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